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super_rancid writes "In a 7,000 word interview with Raspberry Pi's founder posted on TuxRadar.com, Eben Upton talks about the challenges of managing such a successful project, what may be in the Raspberry Pi mark 2, and why he wishes he'd backed the Parallela Kickstarter."
On interesting answer: "We were thinking of booting into Python or booting into Scratch. For younger kids, boot into Scratch. Have an environment where it’s Linux underneath, boots into Scratch and hold down a key at a particular point during boot and it doesn’t boot into Scratch it just drops into the prompt. So you can play with Scratch for six months, once you’re happy with Scratch you turn over the page and 'Hold down F1 during boot,' and it’s like 'Oh look - it’s a PC!' So I think that’s something we’d really like to do."

hmm, just had a look, and from the examples it looks like processing is all written code. I don't think my 8 year old is ready to start learning about syntax. Scratch is extremely visual, as in the actual code is invisible to the user. They build their programs with colored blocks that snap together. It's really done well as far as getting kids to start thinking logically. I'd like to see it expanded so they can continue to develop more advanced projects. Switching them to pure code isn't really an op

Time to move up to Alice [http://www.alice.org/]. My kid was using Scratch for a while and got bored (hit a wall). Just found Alice and plan to install and go through the tutorials with her this weekend.

Your 8yo is already learning syntax in school, just in English and math rather than python and C. It shouldn't be out of the question to start teaching them how to do what they already understand via pure code at the same time as you move them up to a more advanced visual environment.

Something like a math homework checker for instance. A test of a completed math problem that they enter that prints correct or incorrect then loops would be easy to code and make sure they always get a perfect score on their

I was unpleasantly surprised that Scratch 2.0 cannot be downloaded and run on my computer - I had to run it "from the cloud". It's so sad because I really wanted to use it with my kids when we were offline, and the new Scratch has a lot of what I missed from the older version 1.4 for years, making it much more useful to actually teach my kids programming: the ability to easily clone objects in runtime, lists as a data type, and the ability to create custom blocks. At least they're saying that an offline edi

It was cheap! Someone else already paid for all the relatively expensive SoC development work on it. Wasn't a large order of SoC chips originally canceled by a large customer of Broadcom. So this is a contributing factor to making the Raspberry Pi fly. Maybe this is a myth I read but I've always believe this to be the story.

Now of course we can have this (RaspberryPi Mk1 A/B) level of specification/performance cheaper if we build / design something new today, but everyone today expects more, as your po

More RAM is utterly pointless. The slow CPU can hardly make good use of what's already there. Even with 2GB, it would still not become a usable desktop system. The Raspberry Pi is slower than your Mom's smartphone. It is a single core CPU with just 700MHz and a low end instruction set. Even slow ARM based NAS devices have beefier CPUs than the Pi. I own a Pi and other ARM devices. The only one I'm not using is the Pi.

However it's really good at doing things that use the GPU, it's a lot more stable and faster than the alternatives at that price point. A single core 700MHz CPU with 256/512MB RAM and 128MB of VRAM was all we had a couple of years ago and we did really well with it. Sure you won't drive the most modern accelerated GUIs with it but a static, usable GUI works pretty well.

Disclaimer: I have developed a professional embedded advertisement system on the RPi with currently about 50 Pi's deployed.

We did not learn on disposable hardware that's barely able to run common applications.

Back then there wasn't the wealth of common applications in the hands of users, so they were happy to take what they could get. But business was being done on Unix systems and on mainframes and minicomputers and that software very much would not run on the PC.

More RAM is utterly pointless. The slow CPU can hardly make good use of what's already there. Even with 2GB, it would still not become a usable desktop system.

Hello Mr. Monoculture.

Your MP3-player doesn't even have 256MB ram. Does that make it pointless to add more since it won't turn into a usable desktop system if you do?The Pi was never meant to be a desktop system or even a media player. Just because a lot of hobbyists picked it up as a cheap replacement for HTPCs or the gazillion different ARM developer cards doesn't mean that 2GB ram would be pointless for its intended purpose.It have been clear from the start that the Pi is intended to be an educational to

...how useless and overhyped the Pi is today - and has been since more than a year back - when compared to the some of the so much more capable "Android sticks" that cost not much more. Yes, everyone knows that the Pi has a composite video output and a dedicated ethernet output, but that's not what it all comes down to, especially since most of the "Android sticks" come with 2 (or more) USB ports and Wi-Fi these days. What are his thoughts on offering the barely usable amount of 256/512 MB of RAM and just a

I think you misunderstand the purpose of the Pi. The Pi was developed to be an educational tool for high-school aged kids. The fact that hackers and makers found it useful and jumped on the bandwagon is a fortunate side effect, but wasn't a design goal of the Pi.

Useless? Nope. It's not exactly a stellar performer, but it has a lot of uses. Remember, it's designed as an educational product, rather than as a PC replacement. It is not as powerful as your average desktop PC. But it is not useless.

My own Pi runs Samba4 (it's an Active Directory domain controller for my home Windows PC network, and runs a DNS service), it runs CUPS (for network printer sharing), it runs CrashPlan (for backing up my other PCs' data), and it runs the LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) stack so that it can run some dynamic web-based services - the ones I use are Cacti and Observium (for graphing/monitoring my Cisco devices), and Horde Webmail/Groupware.

This is exactly what I used to use an old AMD Sempron box for. Granted, that AMD box was free, and more powerful - but it's bigger, noisier, makes more heat, and consumes more power than the Pi does.

I think the Pi is a fantastic project. It would be nice to see a more powerful ARM CPU and extra RAM on the next version of the board, but I'd be just as happy to see Ethernet being separated from the USB bus, and a SATA connector with the option to set your Pi up to boot from a hard drive out of the box (note that mine does run off a USB hard drive, but it still has to use the MicroSD card as a bootstrap - a SATA controller could also mean faster I/O throughput).

Presuming it can be plugged in - there's always the IOIO [github.com], though that does add another few $$ to the price. But since most people tend to use their RPi as little more than a media streamer or bitcoin mining host for FPGA's / ASICs, etc. then the Android devices are a better option - and GPIO can be added on later if they wanted to (and can then be re-used if they switch/upgrade their Android device, etc.).

I think you underestimate how useless the Android sticks are and how underpowered it's GPU. The RPi GPU clocks at whatever the CPU clocks at (700MHz), the Mali GPU at 500MHz, the MK802 clocks not at 1GHz but is underclocked to somewhere around ~780MHz to keep it relatively stable. Mind you that you can also clock the RPi to 1GHz if you don't mind a relatively unstable board (800MHz is typically okay).

I developed an embedded media platform on the Pi and I've tested some other designs as well, the Android stick while being $15-25 more expensive was slower doing ffmpeg tasks and had problems handling more than one video stream, at 100% CPU (ffmpeg conversion tasks) the Pi would chug along for hours while the Android would regularly reboot and heat up tremendously in the process, it also demands a lot more power (roughly double that of the Pi). The Pi overlays one video stream on the other without much of a hiccup. If the Android did any good it was detecting issues with my programs when they were unexpectedly interrupted.

Quad Core CPU, Single Core GPU vs Single Core CPU, Dual Core GPU. The CPU is not really the problem on most of these platforms, it's the GPU. With RPi now getting Wayland builds that finally use the GPU (mind you, everything (compositing etc) was done on that paltry 700MHz ARM CPU which is really only meant to be an interface to the GPU)

Yes, the RK3188 trails the competition (Exynos quad, Tegra 3) slightly in GPU performance, but spanks it in every other category but storage performance. Well, beats it in every other category, spanks it in a few. Still Mali 400, but they gave it a 25% clock boost. And meanwhile, the Mali is the only ARM GPU for which there are passable FOSS graphics drivers. If you want some assurance of being able to use the hardware for arbitrary purposes in the future, you should still be opting for a Mali-based solutio

When I first read about the Raspberry Pi I was excited because I thought they were going to recreate this boot to a BASIC interpreter-type of experience we used to have on Apple II's and TRS-80's and the like. That's the sort of experience that they claimed inspired the raspberry pi, and they claimed that sort of programming-based, learning-intensive experience was what they wanted the pi to be about.

So, I was very disappointed to see that by default, a raspberry pi really is "just a pc" that boots into your typical CLI, and the "getting started" instructions actually have the new user start up X right off the bat. Providing scratch and a python IDE are nice and all, but I feel like all the normal trappings of "just a pc" take focus away from the real point of the pi.

Something like this should boot in python, with split screen, half of the screen for turtle graphics (yes python includes turtle graphics in its standard library).Then we have something like the LOGO environment of old.While running a long piece of code it should full screen the turtle graphics, with using ESC to terminate the run and return back to split screen.

No wonder you are posting that drivel as anon. Those USB sticks are terribly under-powered, I have a $99 one lying in a drawer as it couldn't handle playing back non-H264 video. There is no way they can handle the kind of uses I hear the Pi is being used for. Even high bit-rate video make the thing blisteringly hot to the touch.

And Android is poor for a general purpose educational device. You can't drop straight into C, Python, etc. You can get some hacks but they are no substitute. As an educational tool,

I'm genuinly interested in the BB Black, how is the GPU offloading? That's the big surprise I've found with the Pi. It outputs Full HD quite nicely for me, but the CPU could do with a touch more grunt.

Also the community that has sprung up around the Pi is something that shouldn't disregarded. The fact you can hit google and get detailed answers from people doing the same thing as you is quite invaluable.

So two products which don't exist (yet? maybe) and the world's cheapest and probably worst-supported RK3188 stick with clearly inadequate ventilation. And the only one which might have decent GPIO somewhere onboard, if you go to the trouble of hacking some leads on, is the tablet.

I'd love to buy one of those tablets. But this does not answer the question.

You should also be aware that RK3066 is still bad at 1080p, so is RK3188. RK3188 has overheating problems at 1080p so far. RK3066 is just bad at it. Also,

RK3188 has soo much overheating problem at 1080p that my retina android tablet.. just works.

What clock? What GPU clock? Is it actually running anywhere near the theoretical maximum? Hardware can be manufactured cheaply, but most of that cheap hardware is shit, as evinced by Raspberry Pi itself.